We [Clarise and I] met with Bernard Golden, The CEO of Navica, again. One of the topics of conversation brought together our work in Business Intelligence and Open Source. Bernard's background includes Informix and our's includes Oracle [No rivalry though] All three of us have worked on large system integration projects requiring strict data modeling and centered around the RDBMS, ETL, EAI, OLTP and OLAP tools selected to best meet the business needs. Clarise and I have worked with Jetstream [ETL & EAI], Mondrian with JPivot [OLAP].

One of the most important aspects of a BI project is the implementing the business process and best practices for the users. Determining what that really means is key to the success of such projects. Do the current business processes implement best practices for that industry, giving the organization a competitive edge, but needing better implementation from IT? Are the best practices implemented in a COTS BI suite better than the organization's current business processes? This is at the heart of most "build versus buy" decisions.

And this is one advantage that open source packages may have over buying a proprietary solution that implements the vendor's version of BI best practices for a given industry or vertical. Open Source can be more cost effectively customized to implement those processes and practices that your organization views as giving a competitive advantage.

3 comments

Mondrian is a nice program with support for MDX and if run on a RDMS such as oracle which supports materialised view can really fly in speed terms.

I recommend you have a look at PALO (www.palo.net or www.opensourceolap.com)
an open source olap server.
Palo is RAM based (but obviously load data into memory at startup and writes data back to files for persistency) so performance is good. Palo should work on 64 bit windows and Linux machines (so large amounts of data can be held in memory).
A major advantage of PALO is that it can write values directly to memory, ideal for planning and “what if” alalysis and calculations are performed in real time. Real time OLAP systems tend to have smaller models (since every combination in the cube doesn’t need to be calculated - therefore you tend not to have problems such as “database explosion")
I recommend any business intelligence practitioner or end user download it have a go.

Wenfengli touted his BIRT a lot. Let’s look at the background behind that…

Wenfeng li incured a huge lawsuit with his previous employer and brought a huge lose in lawsuit money to Actuate. Actuate has to layoff several times.

Then wenfeng li pushed to China. BIRT is his last desperate resort to build his force in Actuate. However, wenfeng li( PMC lead as he named himself )
doesn’t really have much experience in Java technology.

Essentially Wenfeng li is wasting Actuate’s money and resources to gain huge benefits for himself. At the same time to develop a very inferior product and call it a “massive success” and continue to add version number to that…

This blog contains thoughts that range from non-technical to technical. Its name is derived from "Yakity Blah Blah" a column I once had that discussed a cornucopia of ideas. Who am I? I'm Clarise Z. Doval Santos, providing Project Management and Technical Leadership for data management and analytic, data science, IoT and sensor analytics ecosystems
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